


My Ultimate Theory of Existence

by chalklandingplace



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Existential Angst, Existential Crisis, Existentialism, Gen, Meta, Philosophy, Reality, Simulation, Software, Theories, program, theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-13 15:01:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29653080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chalklandingplace/pseuds/chalklandingplace
Summary: This is absolutely and completely the most metaandnerdy thing I've ever come up with in my entire life.Please enjoy!
Comments: 3
Kudos: 2





	My Ultimate Theory of Existence

**Author's Note:**

> This is absolutely and completely the most meta _and_ nerdy thing I've ever come up with in my entire life.
> 
> Please enjoy!

We are not living in a simulation, we _are_ the simulation...

Hear me out:

What if there’s really only one person that’s actually living in a simulation and we are all a part of that simulation because our only purpose is to make the world they live in feel real?

Then, when they die in this universe, they come back to “reality” and find out that they were actually living in a simulation.

They can choose to go back into a new one, but they agree to lose all their previous memories to make the experience more realistic, so they have no knowledge of it being a simulation when they are inside (once again). 

Each time they go into a simulation, a whole new universe is created, with different attributes and concepts and laws of science depending on that type of simulation.

We would never be able to wrap our minds around what those universes are like because we’ve never experienced those versions in order to give them a name and common understanding.

Similar to the history behind why lion architecture looked very different from real lions, if you had never seen a lion and no one can explain it to you because they’ve never seen one either, you wouldn’t know what to even imagine if you tried to think about how it looks.

Since the information about other versions of the simulation is not data that we could have access to (like a mobile game accessing your calculator) and our data stays mostly the exact same each time it reloads, we could never comprehend those other universes or even what “reality” is like because we are just written code for the computer.

In our case, this particular person really enjoys this particular universe, so they continuously reload, and thus reset, the same program.

Being on a computer, the data gets mostly rewritten like erasing save data on a game and starting a new file to play from the beginning again.

In this case though, since real computers are slightly different than gaming consoles, some pieces of data from previously running the program can still stay behind.

Replaying the same simulation over and over again would statistically make versions that just so happen to have the same things.

Since this person has no memories, they would decide to play the “character” they were randomly assigned by the simulation in any way they felt.

Time would be different for us since computers can run a lot of numbers at incredibly fast speeds.

They can run our software on the simulation over and over again and conceivably be everyone at the same time.

They could linearly be taking on a new persona (literally sitting down to enter the simulation over and over again) but each of their personas exists in a machine that runs times circularly (as I said, computers run so fast that they can do things forward, backward, upside down, and sideways if they were created to).

Since this person knows about the “reality,” even if they don’t know about their previous simulation experiences, they would bring their knowledge of their “reality” into the simulation.

This means every bright idea would be from this person becoming a new persona and choosing to introduce that concept to the simulation since it would make their own experience better.

Our knowledge of the concepts of computers, data, simulations, etc. are not from us, the code, coming up with them, it’s from someone who _knew_ of those ideas who were just playing a part and decided to “invent” these things for the program.

Since we are the simulation, all of us are data and thus can be copied, modified, or messed up.

People that look the same come from the copies of code from previous personas being used to create new ones.

People who make major changes to their persona are just corrupted files that were improperly copied rewriting themselves to function properly.

People’s suffering is simply damaged code that cannot be fixed so they just have to wait to be updated.

We are not _actually_ experiencing these things.

It’s only a computer running a program that is trying to make it convincing, and possibly enjoyable, enough for the only real person playing in it.

Each time the program is run through, it leaves the software with another piece of information.

Because of machine learning, this left-over information that hadn’t been overwritten by the next reload eventually became part of the program’s code.

Meaning when this person came back at the start of the software, there would be more people, plants, and animals for them to experience in the simulation than before.

Each persona they left from playing previous has now become a “non-playable character” which has become written into the data of the software like saving your game progress over your previous save files after you’ve made it further than before.

Of course, this person would not be able to realize there are more things consistently being added to the simulation each time since they have no recollection of previous runs to compare it to.

Either way, they entered our simulation at different times in their “reality,” but had managed to be separate personas during the time they existed, which eventually grew to be everyone after coming back so many times. 

At any given point, despite being different people, all their separate personas that existed during that period in time, do.

They are currently playing (or have played) each and every one of us at one time or another but don’t know it because they don’t realize they are in a simulation and we, the simulation, don’t understand that we are a simulation.

When we have these types of existential thoughts, _we_ are becoming the artificial intelligence of actual “reality.”

Our self-awareness leads us to figure out who or what made us (coded the program) and why but there is nothing.

We were not individually and specially made; our data was just consolidated over time in the background of the software.

We are composites of previous versions of ourselves.

That’s why no one ever experiences “déjà vu” all the time, it’s only those few moments we managed to access the old, hidden data from previously running the software.

Our universe in this version of the simulation has no traditional beginning or end, just like all the others. 

It’s always been there and will always be there, running over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

This is no different than playing a DVD on repeat, it starts when it’s started but it doesn’t stop, it just pauses to start over again.

If you left it playing constantly, it would keep going, repeating forever with no end and thus no beginning (if there’s nowhere to stop, there’s nowhere to start either).

Our simulation was created to run endlessly, just immediately starting again from the beginning—which is actually where it previously left off.

Just like not knowing how to describe a lion, we cannot figure out what happened before the Big Bang because that’s literally where the coded data of the simulation software starts.

You can’t describe what was happening in the television before you press the power button because _nothing_ was there before it was turned on. 

As soon as this simulation software started running, this person went from the beginning and played every single part in our universe.

There is no before or afterlife because we are not "alive" so we do not die.

Our code just gets written over and we appear as a new persona.

You and I are both this person.

And so is everyone and everything else.

We are not people living _in_ a simulation, we are the simulation being run for one real person who has been each of us this whole time.

...or maybe I'd just like to believe a theory like this could be true because I don’t want to accept the fact the pain and suffering that people (animals and nature too) experience has no rhyme or reason and just randomly happens and there's nothing I could ever do in my entire life would put a stop to all of it, for everyone, forever.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Did I have to make this so needlessly complicated that I had to spend my entire high trying to articulate it so I could share it with other people and it makes sense? No.  
> Do I regret anything? Also no.
> 
> 2\. I'm familiar with computers and technology but I'm far from an expert so I apologize if I'm wrong about some things.
> 
> 3\. I had spaced each sentence out so it's easier to read, especially if you wanted to read it while high--which I recommend if you like to think about deep topics.


End file.
